October 22nd, 2008 by Josh Gillespie
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October 22nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I will be voting no. They are calling this “consolidation of government,” a.k.a. consolidation of power. Right now, if I have an issue with my assessor, I can walk down the street to see him. If he fails to represent me and the other residents of my township, I could run a campaign against him and win. If it were only a county assessor, these things would be beyond my reach.
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Voting yes. Township government is the wave of the past. And this is me waving goodbye.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
The time for property tax ELIMINATION is now! Township government needs to be reinvigorated with more county functions to bring government closer to the people. This is the REPUBLICAN way!
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Actually, since township government costs more money to operate than a centralized county government would, maybe it IS the Republican way.
But it’s not the conservative way.
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Nathan, you’ve been listening too much to Democratic propaganda.
The truth is making efficiency the goal doesn’t equal effectiveness, it just greases the skids to tyranny. Consolidation always costs more because it puts more power into fewer hands who like to accessorize their trappings of power with grandiose projects like Olympic size swimming pools and sports complexes (in the case of schools).
October 23rd, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I’ve lived a lot of places. Sometimes, consolidation saves money, since duplicate efforts are eliminated. Sometimes, it costs money, because with a larger organization, people feel it important to do things “professionally”, instead of getting by on the cheap.
Forty years ago, most towns had their own bank, and most of them had one branch. Over the years, the number of the banks has gone down, and the average number of branches has gone up.
You’d think that bigger banks are better, but in fact, small banks are considerably more profitable. That’s because they know their customers very well, so they tend to have many fewer bad loans.
So why do banks keep buying each other up, in order to get bigger? Well, it seems that while a bigger bank makes less money, the top management of a big bank makes more money. And who decides that bank A should buy up bank B? Top management. Oh, the board is involved, but they only know what top management tells them….
October 26th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I will be voting yes on Question 1. I do not understand why people say it is “reckless” or a “knee-jerk, frustration” reaction. Why wouldn’t I be willing to pay more in property tax in the town where I consume all or most of the services, as do my children, versus paying property tax AND state income tax when I have no idea what the state is doing with our money? Government taxes and charges license fees on everything we do or buy. They are not hurting for revenue and they would not have to supply towns w/ as much aid when the towns could then handle it themselves. Just do the math on what you pay now and what you’d have to pay in property taxes only, in order to fund what your own city/town needed. To me it’s a no brainer. I was listening to the news the other day about how many staffers at the state house would be laid off and I could not believe there were even that many staffers to the officials employed there. Government definitely needs a wake-up call.